Is it OK to take 'tainted money'?

One of the reasons why this is a complex topic topic to handle in a conversation like this is that some of the most powerful organizations that are kind of involved in progress towards these rights that you're describing are also part of the power structures and systems that have limited those rights.

I mean, in some cases, this is, you know, extremely explicit, and I'd love to get sort of your, you know, historical perspective on the fact that a lot of philanthropies and foundations came to the issue of reproductive rights from a historical concern that looks a lot like eugenics.

That sort of history plays in very deeply here.

But I also think there's a sort of subtler and more complicated way in which philanthropy writ large is kind of implicated in some of these power dynamics that might put some downward pressure on the full realization of human rights in the way that you're talking about.

And I'm going to quote you to yourself.

In an interview with Alliance magazine earlier this year, you said, women and girls don't need to be protected.

We need to be free.

And that conversation is one that requires giving women agency over their own bodies, makes philanthropic organizations, most of which are consciously or unconsciously steeped in patriarchy, squeamish.

And I raise that quote because I think there's an interesting dynamic here.

On one side, we could interrogate the very direct ways in which patriarchal power suppresses women and other groups.

But then even the sort of organizations that are held up to be part of the quote unquote solution to that problem, are sort of interwoven with the same history and power dynamics that are bringing those pressures to bear.

So I'd love to get just a little bit more from you about that fundamental tension between philanthropy and agency when it comes to women and their bodies.

And maybe I'm overstating it a bit.

I mean, look, there's a very well-quoted quote, and I don't even know anymore where it comes from, but certainly I heard it first from Darren Walker in the context of my working with him at the Ford Foundation.

And he said, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

And I would say that we still have in most parts of the world and probably 98% of the world, if not more, a culture that is a culture of patriarchy that predominates.

So the struggles that feminists have waged for, And I don't think, you know, you might think the modern feminist movement begins with Olympe de Gouges and the French Revolution when she says, well, why is it just the rights of men? What about the rights of women? And they promptly cut off her head, the same comrades with whom she had fought for the, you know, for the rights of peasants and workers.

So it's far, far older than that.

There have been women struggling to raise the question of equality and justice for much longer than that.

But certainly within the Western context, that's often considered to be sort of the start of a struggle for feminism.

But I would say that what we live with today in 2026, where a woman is being considered in a trial right now for murdering her children when we live in a society that provides women with no real support either on research on their hormonal changes or on their overall health or anything like that where we have a president of the most powerful nation on earth who has actually been accused of physically violating and harming a woman and refuses, even though he has been found guilty, to pay damages for that, where we have the statistic that the UN Women throws out of one in three women having suffered some form of sexual or physical violence in her life, not just once but multiple times, I don't think you can say that we live in a world that is not patriarchal.

And I say that to set the context for, therefore, philanthropy, right? So we do not live in a world that is unpatriarchal.

Neither do we live in a world that is non-capitalist.

And let's be clear, the first set of issues that philanthropy deals with, as Martin Luther King said a long time ago, is that philanthropy is commendable, but one must not forget the conditions, the economic conditions that make philanthropy necessary.

And The economic system that we call capitalism has concentrated such immense power and wealth in the hands of so few people that we literally have a situation today where eight men control, you know, more than half the resources of the world.